About 15 years ago — during the golden hour of life I now think of as my early 30s — some of my old high-school buddies and I started an inside joke in which we evaluated our sense of worth and masculine value based unscientifically on our imagined levels of testosterone.
The archives on the exact origin of this banter have been lost to the sands of time, but the typical delivery went something like this: “Man, I could barely get to the gym this morning. I’m just feeling super low T.” Or: “Sorry dudes, staying in tonight. Low T strikes again.” One of our friends, who had been particularly prone to a state of xennial malaise since we were kids — his mantra during high school had been a Bartleby-esque refrain of “I almost care” — was even saddled with a nickname that rhymed “low T” with his surname.
Over time, the expression “low T” migrated into a vast range of applications, many of which were explicitly applied with a sarcastic wink of absurdity. Couldn’t get motivated to ask someone on a date? Low T. Couldn’t work overtime for extra pay? Low T. Forgot to wish your mom happy birthday? Low T, bro. The basic idea was that any time you shirked away from an opportunity to seize the day or prove yourself in the zero-sum game of modern existence, it could be chalked up to a case of hormonal imbalance.
Testosterone: it gave you muscles; made you angry, fearless and powerful; and was somehow connected to that ever-expanding category of infinitely contradictory things that “make you a man.” On days when we no longer felt like being “men,” it was easier to just blame the magical he-man hormone that we did or didn’t sufficiently possess than actually consider why we weren’t living up to some fantasy of the more potent people we were supposed to be.
For about a year, the low-T joke carried some solid currency until it died out — this should be no surprise — about the same time we all started raising kids. Nothing strips a person of excuses for inaction like a screaming baby who needs a diaper change.
T Time
Yet, here I am, a decade and a half later, finding myself returning — in a way that isn’t totally coherent or fully realized — to some of what my younger self was wrestling with back then. Maybe it’s the rampant discourse on the importance (necessity?) of supplementing your life with testosterone in manosphere media, or the way testosterone testing is supposed to lead our nation toward the creation of a G.I. Joe military force of the likes not seen since Sparta. Ultimately, though, I find that all the calls proclaiming the glory of being a high-T person ring like a cracked bell: loud, resonant, but ultimately flat.
For most of my life, I felt like I possessed some magical serum flowing inside of me that supercharged my days with a very forward-pointing sense of direction, drive, purpose and meaning.
When I was younger, helmetlessly dropping a ledge on skis into some powder-filled riverbed made complete sense as a productive way to find that direction, drive, purpose and meaning. The moment of action was a rush, sure, but it also proved to me that I was capable, courageous, adept — all bricks in a wall of identity that needed to be mortared into place to hold up the rest of who I was. In my early 20s, when every cell in my body told me to spend three hours a day training and competing as an amateur boxer, T was the voice in my head (collapsed septum, sprained jaw, post-concussive fogginess be damned) that said “step forth” every time the bell rang.
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I’ve logged miles in the Grand Canyon, White Mountains and San Juans. None of that compares to my lifetime of unmapped loops in Midcoast Maine.A New Calculus
The gift of being high T was that it compelled me to understand my morally foggy and sometimes contextless world with a clear, binary sensibility. Do I want to be strong or weak? Brave or cowardly? Dominant or submissive? The late-20s joke of having low T was, perhaps, a kind of secret code for the slowly unfolding realization that the world of my future self — where such conquests are kind of cool and fun but ultimately shallow — might require a new set of laws, a new calculus of identity where T, whatever it meant, and however it related to the comings and goings of daily life, would no longer be a functional measure of self-worth.
It’s no mystery. Whatever is happening to my body at 46 — I can’t poke around the internet without being reminded that my muscle mass, libido, primal desire and professional ambition is decreasing by percentage points every year — I know two things for sure: the mystical T quotient in my life is not increasing, yet it doesn’t remotely feel as relevant as it once did.
Happy to Lose
How many times have I scribbled little circuit-training regimens onto restaurant receipts, with detailed numbers of how many reps and sets I plan to do in the gym the next morning…only to quietly quit two-thirds of the way through?
How many times have I shown up to work, maybe even on a day when I’m facing down an opportunity to prove myself, or excel in some ego-feeding way, then sat in the parking lot a little too long and stared out the windshield, wondering what — work, success, ambition, high performance, professional acumen — any of it is all about?
How many times have I seen younger guys flex in the gym mirrors, lusting after the pop of their own veins, and thought to myself: man, that has absolutely nothing to do with the current of life as I’ve come to know it?
As the other joke goes: may you live long enough until you become the person you used to make fun of. I am now the low-T man: happy to lose, to quit early, to skip the last lap. I am happy to let someone else tell their story, to watch others take the podium, to let someone else close the bar down.
I’m sure there’s some moral thinking behind this second phase of life — I’ve matured; I must be trying to be a more humble, less selfish and more gracious person — but it’s also a way of thinking that feels more in line with the kind of physical person I’m actually becoming. Going super hard, crushing this, full-sending that; it all feels out of step with the realities of my middle-aged body. Being a high-T guy right now feels like I’m trying to comprehend the negative of some faded photo of my younger self. If I hold it up to the light, I can kind of what’s there — but mostly what I see is empty space.
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